Support for cleaning orphaned files that no longer have an associated program

Hi.

I think it would be cool if the CCleaner developers could add a feature that can scan for orphaned files that don't have an associated program and have been left behind for some reason. Similar to the registry cleaner function where it scans for registry entries that reference a file that's no longer there. Thank you.

bigbend

I think this is a nearly impossible task. There is no software that can do that (as far as I am aware of). I fondly remember the days of Magic Eye though. It was a Windows 3.x (or was it Win 95/98?) software that allowed you to install software while taking a snapshot of the whole installation process thus allowing you uninstall everything properly afterwards.

eL_PuSHeR is right, after a program has been installed then uninstalled it would be nearly impossible to detect which leftovers are still in use by some other app.

Still, Revo Uninstaller is a program that does something like that, but it works at the time of installation, I think. Free and paid. A link is here:

http://www.revouninstaller.com/revo_uninstaller_free_download.html

Andavari is one of our moderators and is very familiar with Revo, he will be along soon, will know more.

I believe REVO needs to have been running and monitoring when the program (that leaves behind) was installed for it to work properly (but I may well be incorrect). I kinda agree that there's no LOGICAL (as in computer logic) way for CCleaner (or any other program) to know what is orphaned, without user intervention at some level.

Mostly the results would be very similar to this

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/174143

Yeah, this is pretty much impossible. It would be cool if Windows would associate the GUID of any application to every file it creates. I wonder if there's a way to fake that...

Andavari is one of our moderators and is very familiar with Revo, he will be along soon, will know more.

I'm not completely familiar with it. I'm more familiar using tools like Total Uninstall and ZSoft Uninstaller that go further than even Revo because they monitor all of the changes a software installation and first use will do - but even they aren't a 100% guarantee for getting rid of everything as it pertains to the registry. Especially registry areas like CurrentControlSet data, also they can cause problems if removing some drivers, security software, etc.

I am new to the forum so please diregaurd any inappropiate responses. At ursoftware.com is a program called Your Un-Installer that does a decent job scanning for all changes made by an installed program. It offers different types and depths of scans and shows recent installations. I have used it for 3 or 4 years with out problems in XP to 7-64.

There is no way that a utility can discriminate between a folder with a left-over file and a folder with a portable stand-alone executable or a folder with a vital user document.